Part 15 (2/2)
The changing status of the married woman, her increasing economic independence and its bearing upon her economic responsibility, are all facts having an influence upon woman as a wage-earning member of the community, but how, and in what degree, they affect her length of service, is still quite uncertain. It is probable too, that they affect the employment or non-employment of women very differently in different occupations, but how, and in what degree they do so is mere guess-work at present.
Much pains has been expended in arguing that any system of vocational training should locally be co-related with the industries of the district. Vain effort! For it appears that the workers of all ages are on the move all the time. Out of 22,027 thirteen-year-old boys in the public schools of seventy-eight American cities, only 12,699, or a little more than half, were living in the places of their birth. And considering the _wanderl.u.s.t_ of the young in any case, is anything more probable than that the very first thing a big proportion of this advancing body of ”vocationally trained” young men and women will want to do will be to try out their training in some other city? And why should they not?
If there has ever been voiced a tenderer plea for a universal education that shall pa.s.s by no child, boy or girl, than that of St.i.tt Wilson, former Socialist Mayor of Berkeley, I do not know it. If there has ever been outlined a finer ideal of an education fitting the child, every child, to take his place and fill his place in the new world opening before him, I have not heard of it. He asks that we should submit ourselves to the leaders.h.i.+p of the child--his needs, his capacities, his ideal hungers--and in so doing we shall answer many of the most disturbing and difficult problems that perplex our twentieth-century civilization. Even in those states which make the best attempt at educating their children, from three-fourths to nine-tenths, according to the locality, leave the schools at the age of thirteen or fourteen, and the present quality of the education given from the age of twelve to sixteen is neither an enrichment in culture, nor a training for life and livelihood. It is too brief for culture, and is not intended for vocation.
Mr. Wilson makes no compromise with existing conditions; concedes not one point to the second-rate standards that we supinely accept; faces the question of cost, that basic difficulty which most theoretical educators waive aside, and which the public never dreams of trying to meet and overcome. Here are some of his proposals.
The New Education [he writes] will include training and experience in domestic science, cookery and home-making; agriculture and horticulture; pure and applied science, and mechanical and commercial activities with actual production, distribution and exchange of commodities. Such training for three to six millions of both s.e.xes from the age of twelve to twenty-one years will require land, tools, buildings of various types, machinery, factory sites by rail and water, timber, water and power sources.
As all civilization is built upon the back of labor, and as all culture and leisure rests upon labor, and is not possible otherwise, so all cultural and liberal education, as generally understood, shall be sequent to the productive and vocational. The higher intellectual education should grow out of and be earned by productive vocational training.
Hence our schools should be surrounded by lands of the best quality obtainable, plots of 10, 50, 100 and more acres. These lands should be the scene of labor that would be actually productive and not mere play.... In such a school the moral elements of labor should be primary, viz.: joy to the producer, through industry and art; perfect honesty in quality of material and character of workmans.h.i.+p; social cooperation, mutualism, and fellows.h.i.+p among the workers or students; and last, but not least, justice--that is, the full product of labor being secured to the producer.
He plans to make the schools largely self-supporting, partly through land endowments easier to obtain under the system of taxation of land values that is possibly near at hand in the Golden State, for which primarily the writer is planning. The other source of income would be from the well-directed labor of the students themselves, particularly the older ones. He quotes Professor Frank Lawrence Glynn, of the Vocational School at Albany, New York, as having found that the average youth can, not by working outside of school hours, but in the actual process of getting his own education, earn two dollars a week and upward. Elsewhere, Mr. Wilson shows that the beginnings of such schools are to be found in operation today, in some of the best reform inst.i.tutions of the country.
For all who desire university training, this would open the door. They would literally ”work their way” through college. One university'
president argues for some such means of helping students: ”We need not so much an increase of beneficiary funds as an increase of the opportunities for students to earn their living.” This is partly to enable them to pay; for their courses and thereby acquire an education, but chiefly because through supporting themselves they gain self-confidence and therefore the power of initiative.[A]
[Footnote A: ”The social and educational need for vocational training is equally urgent. Widespread vocational training will democratize the education of the country: (1) by recognizing different tastes and abilities, and by giving an equal opportunity to all to prepare for their lifework; (2) by extending education through part-time and evening instruction to those who are at work in the shop or on the farm.” Report of the Commission on National Aid to Vocational Instruction, 1914, page 12.]
XI
THE WORKING WOMAN AND MARRIAGE
It is a lamentable fact that the wholesome and normal tendency towards organization which is now increasingly noticeable among working-women has so far remained unrelated to that equally normal and far more deeply rooted and universal tendency towards marriage.
As long as the control of trade unionism among women remained with men, no link between the two was likely to be forged; the problem is so entirely apart from any that men unionists ever have to face themselves. It is true that with a man the question of adhering to a union alike in times of prosperity or times of stress may be complicated by a wife having a ”say-so,” through her enthusiasm or her indifference when it means keeping up dues or attending meetings; yet more, when belonging to a union may mean being thrown out of work or ordered on strike, just when there has been a long spell of sickness or a death with all the attendant expenses, or when perhaps a new baby is expected or when the hard winter months are at hand and the children are lacking shoes and clothes. Still, roughly speaking, a man worker is a unionist or a non-unionist just the same, be he single or married.
But how different it is with a girl! The counter influence exerted by marriage upon organization is not confined to those girls who leave the trade, and of course the union, if they have belonged to one, after they have married. The possibility of marriage and especially the exaggerated expectations girls entertain as to the improvement in their lot which marriage will bring them is one of the chief adverse influences that any organization composed of women or containing many women members has to reckon with, an influence acting all the time on the side of those employers who oppose organization among their girls.
It has been the wont of many men unionists in the past and is the custom of not a few today, to accept at its face value the girl's own argument: ”What's the use of our joining the union? We'll be getting married presently.” It is much the same feeling, although unspoken, that underlies the ordinary workingman's unwillingness to see women enter his trade and his indifference to their status in the trade once they have entered it. The man realizes that this rival of his is but a temporary worker, and he often, too often, excuses himself tacitly, if not in words, from making any effort to aid her in improving her position or from using his influence and longer experience to secure for her any sort of justice, forgetting that the argument, ”She'll soon get married” is a poor one at best, seeing that as soon as one girl does marry her place will immediately be filled by another, as young, as inexperienced as she had been, and as utterly in need of the protection that experienced and permanent co-workers could give her.
The girl, although she guesses it not, is only too frequently made the instrument of a terrible retribution; for the poor wage, which was all that she in her individual helplessness was able to obtain for herself, is used to lower the pay of the very man, who, had he stood by her, might have helped her to a higher wage standard and at the same time preserved his own.
Again, the probability of the girl marrying increases on all sides the difficulties encountered in raising standards alike of work and of wages. Bound up with direct payment are those indirect elements of remuneration or deduction from remuneration covered by length of working-hours and by sanitary conditions, since whatever saps the girl's energy or undermines her health, whether overwork, foul air, or unsafe or too heavy or overspeeded machinery, forms an actual deduction from her true wages, besides being a serious deduction from the wealth-store, the stock of well-being, of the community.
Up till comparatively recent times the particular difficulties I have been enumerating did not exist, since, under the system of home industries universal before the introduction of steam-power, there was not the same economic compet.i.tion between men and women, nor was there this unnatural gap between the occupation of the woman during her girlhood and afterwards in her married life. In the majority of cases, indeed, she only continued to carry on under her husband's roof the very trades which she had learned and practiced in the home of her parents. And this applied equally to the group of trades which we still think of as part of the woman's natural home life, baking and cooking and cleaning and sewing, and to that other group which have become specialized and therefore are now pursued outside the home, such as spinning and weaving. It was true also in large part of the intrinsically out-of-door employments, such as field-work.
In writing about a change while the process is still going on, it is extremely difficult to write so as not to be misunderstood. For there are remote corners, even of the United States, where the primitive conditions still subsist, and where woman still bears her old-time relation to industry, where the industrial life of the girl flows on with no gap or wrench into the occupational life of the married woman.
Through wifehood and motherhood she indeed adds to her burdens, and complicates her responsibilities, but otherwise she spends her days in much the same fas.h.i.+on as before, with some deduction, often, alas, inadequate, to allow for the bearing and rearing of her too frequent babies. Also in the claims that industry makes upon her in her relation to the productive life of the community, under such primitive conditions, her life rests upon the same basis as before.
As a telling ill.u.s.tration of that primitive woman's occupations, as she carries them on among us today, the following will serve. Quite recently a friend, traveling in the mountainous regions of Kentucky, at the head of Licking Creek, had occasion to call at a little mountain cabin, newly built out of logs, the c.h.i.n.ks stopped up with clay, evidently the pride and the comfort of the dwellers. It consisted of one long room. At one end were three beds. In the center was the family dining-table, and set out in order on one side a number of bark-seated hickory chairs made by the forest carpenters. On the other a long bench, probably intended for the younger members of the family. Facing the door, as the visitor entered, was a huge open fireplace, with a bar across, whence hung three skillets of kettles for the cooking of the food. The only occupant of the cabin at that hour in the afternoon was an old woman. She was engaged in combing into smoothness with two curry-combs a great pile of knotted wool, washed, but otherwise as it came off the sheep's back. The wool was destined to be made into blankets for the household. The simple apparatus for the carrying-out of the whole process was there at hand, for the spinning-wheel stood back in a corner of the room, while the big, heavy loom had, for convenience' sake, been set up on the porch.
That old woman's life may be bare and narrow enough in many ways, but at least she is rich and fortunate in having the opportunity for the exercise of a skilled trade, and in it an outlet for self-expression, and even for artistic taste in the choice of patterns and colors.
Far different the lot of the factory worker with her monotonous and mindless repet.i.tion of lifeless movements at the bidding of the machine she tends. The Kentucky mountain woman was here practicing in old age the art she had acquired in her girlhood. Those early lessons which had formed her industrial education, were of life-long value, both in enriching her own life, and by adding to her economic and therefore social value, alike as a member of her own household, and as a contributor to the wealth of the little community.
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